Justin Sun, founder and chief executive of Tron, is known for keeping the Tron and crypto communities in suspense. Sun tweeted on Oct. 12 that Tron is partnering with an industry giant valued at tens of billions of dollars but asked the crypto verse to guess who the partner is.

On the same day, CoinNess tweeted that it had been informed by the Tron team that Tron and Baidu had confirmed a partnership. The details of the deal are still not known. Baidu Cloud is expected to make an official announcement next week.

What This Deal Could Mean for Tron

Justin Sun tweeted:

“Finally, first time to partner with tens of billions USD valuation industry giant. Guess the name.”

The crypto community reacted very well to the news that Tron is partnering with Baidu. Baidu has the lion’s share of the Chinese Internet search market accounting for over 76 percent of the market, and its next competitor, Alibaba Shenma, has a distant 14 percent of the market. Baidu, also referred to as the Google of China, is used by more than two billion people worldwide, or 28 percent of the global population.

In less than 24 hours after Sun’s tweet, Tron’s native token, TRX, reacted positively to the speculation, and its price jumped more than 16 percent from $0.02 to $0.023667. TRX’s price is currently sitting at $0.024671.

If the partnership finally goes ahead, it will be good for Tron in 2019 and going forward. The deal could see Tron exposed on a wider scale, opening more doors for adoption and possibly commanding a respectable position on the market cap list. TRX is currently the eleventh largest cryptocurrency with a market cap of more than $1.6 billion.

Tron Partnerships

In May, rumors emerged that Tron was planning to buy BitTorrent, a file-sharing protocol launched in 2001. Along the way, the deal went sour with lawsuits in-between. The Tron Foundation put the matter to rest on July 24 through a blog post confirming the acquisition.

Part of the blog post read:

“From this day on, BitTorrent, whose software has been installed on billions of user devices, will become part of the TRON ecosystem, making TRON the largest decentralized Internet ecosystem in the world.”

According to TechCrunch, the deal was worth $126 million.

One of the biggest rumors around Tron was its looming partnership with Alibaba, the largest e-commerce business in China founded by Jack Ma in 1999. Ma and Sun have a close relationship, and it could have worked in favor of the deal. The Tron leader was among the first graduates of Ma’s Hupan University.

Many predicted that the partnership would propel TRX to as high as $4. But the deal hasn’t been inked yet, and there are doubts that it will ever be. Alibaba denied the partnership.

Whether Tron’s partnership with Baidu goes through or not, Tron has had an eventful year. The decentralized platform successfully launched its mainnet on May 31 and followed it up with a couple of successful projects.